Health Canada, the country’s federal health regulator, has started appealing to a few federally-licensed cannabis companies to halt the sale of specific ingestible products.

This effort from the Federal health regulator stemmed from the “erroneous” classification and labeling of ingestible cannabis products as “extracts” instead of the usual “edibles” label.

However, such a move by Health Canada could cost the whole cannabis industry millions of dollars. The potential financial loss could be related to the increasing popularity of chewable extracts.

Despite the already years-long market availability of chewable cannabis products, the Canadian health regulator’s peculiar timing on cannabis extract crackdowns has left several marijuana business executives puzzled.

Besides, the said crackdown poses a timely threat to the marijuana industry in Canada because some publicly-traded cannabis manufacturers still haven’t recovered from their financial loss.

As per Health Canada, the core rules for all brand-new cannabis products are that licensed cannabis producers should comply with what the Government of Canada refers to as the Notice of New Cannabis Product (NNCP) process. As the name implies, this process requires licensed manufacturers to inform the federal health regulator of brand-new products several months ahead.

Even though an ingestible cannabis product underwent the NNCP measures, that product does not entirely mean it obtained a seal of approval from Health Canada. Instead, the NNCP process allows the federal health regulator to make a heads-up on all brand-new products as efficiently as possible ahead of time.

More importantly, the Notice of New Cannabis Product process enables Health Canada to work with cannabis producers in addressing any regulatory issue before those companies ultimately spend millions on manufacturing and marketing.